


Orion

by ianixela



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: AU, Adultery, Angst, Disability, Ex-Military Ben Solo, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, I know the tags are heavy AF but almost everything is implied, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Journalist Rey, Loss of Limbs, Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pregnancy, Reylo - Freeform, Reylo Baby, Slow Burn, Unplanned Pregnancy, also this has an HEA, heavy baggage, i'm sorry pls mind the warnings, implied war, reylo au, this is so far out of canon holy crap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:33:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23177764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ianixela/pseuds/ianixela
Summary: Rey Niima finds herself in the Saharan desert trying to heal wounds from her life, and Ben Solo is there too, fixing himself along the way.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 64
Kudos: 194





	1. Free Fall

**Author's Note:**

> I'm currently quarantined and working remotely because I have asthma...so yeah, I'm cranking work out like there's no tomorrow.
> 
> As you can imagine, I think about Adam’s military service a whole lot. Like a LOT. And it’s inspired this somewhat. You could assume that this Clyde Logan adjacent and actually, not at all. I've had this fic in mind/partially written way before I've even watched Logan Lucky.
> 
> I’ve been toying with this story a whole lot, back and forth because can you really stray too far from canon, even in an AU setting? I don’t feel like anyone is particularly OOC in this but I’ve had to manipulate a lot of factors for it to make sense, and I hope it doesn’t take away from your enjoyment of the characters. I mean, you read these for that character connection, I’m not gonna turn this into original fic with familiar names!?!? Anyhoo I hope this works out. It's very AU, it's long, it's intricate, annnnd it's been in my head for a long time and I had to get it out. It deals with rather difficult subjects as a whole, and I’ve done a lot of research to make this as accurate as possible so I hope I didn’t mess up anywhere, if I did it’s 100% my fault, this is as unbeta-ed as usual and terribly edited by me so sorry if it’s bad...
> 
> Warnings for AU, mentions of war, severe injury (described but not in the timeline), body horror (of sorts), amputations/loss of limb (not in the timeline and briefly described), PTSD, abortion (not in timeline and hinted at), pregnancy, sex, alcohol, mature themes and language. Mind the tags!

* * *

Rey Niima is terrible at many things, but she certainly is at keeping in touch with her mother.

The old woman likes to remind Rey of it when she calls her from her overheated hotel room in Istanbul, her mother’s English clipped and crisp.

“I’m sorry mom, I got held up at the airport…”

Hers is drawled, tinted with all the other languages vying for attention in her brain. French and Arabic, Creole, Russian, Spanish, Cantonese. Bits and pieces she’s picked up, never enough to be quite fluent but enough to let her do her job.

She hears her mother sigh at the other end. She’s used to this, to her excuses.

_ “The camera again?” _

It wasn’t the camera, but the lie comes easy.

“Yeah, I always have to prove its really a camera and show the press passes and yeah, it's a process…anyway, I’ll try to keep in touch more…” she promises but her mother knows better than to believe it.

She knows her daughter’s wildly independent streak, the one that made her leave the parental home aged 16 to study in France, and never come back.

_ “Don’t you think you should come home sometimes? I mean, it is hardly a vacation staying in that part of the world when your last assignment was two countries away…” _

Home to her mother is London.

A gated house in Chelsea, right by the steady flow of the Thames. A pretty residential area filled with flowers and gardens.

Home to her mother, but not  _ hers. _

Rey has lived everywhere. Where the assignments took her. The world is her home, her apartments, hotel rooms and borrowed houses, tents, truck cabs, the backseat of armoured vehicles, military barracks.

Home is  _ not  _ with her mom in London.

“I’m not staying in Turkey, mom. I’m headed to Morocco in two days. I’ve always wanted to see the desert, you know it.”

She tries to bring her mind around, to tell her mother why she detoured to Turkey before heading to North Africa but the words die on her tongue.

_ “Haven’t you seen enough?”  _ her mother chimes in the receiver,  _ “Irak and Syria, it wasn’t dry and dangerous enough for you?” _

Her mother’s tone is filled with long-tried patience.

“It's not the same…I’ve always wanted to photograph Berbère communities.”

_ “Sounds like an assignment, not a vacation.” _

“Journalism is my life, mom.”

Her mother knows. She knows better than anyone. The first camera she’d ever owned had been her tenth anniversary gift from her, a polaroid she still used. She’d taken it with her on her very first assignment, photographing Sao Paulo’s slums for National Geographic.

“I’ll come to London before my next assignment, I promise.”

Promises, she  _ does _ keep. She hears her mother’s relieved humming at the other end, knowing she’ll have her way.

_ “We can go see your uncle in Switzerland. Take a ski trip, like when you were little, remember?” _

There are fond memories of snowy mountains and hot chocolate, the sharp scent of firewood. Cuddling in a pile of blankets with her mother when she was small enough to protect still, and the memory brings tears to her eyes, but she doesn’t let them change her voice.

She’s too old to protect now. She has to deal with her own life.

“Yes, let's do that. I’ll call you when I get to Essaouira.”

_ “Alright. I love you baby.” _

“Love you too mom.”

She had wanted to tell her.

Her reason for being here.

Her reason for calling really, but she hadn’t found the courage, afraid of disappointing her with her life choices.

The abortion she’d had two weeks prior still weighed like lead on her shoulders.

It had been the right decision. For herself, for her career, for the married-with-children colleague involved.

That's what she kept telling herself, to take away the guilt.

Being pregnant in her line of work was a liability. It disqualified her from most assignments, and then life with a child was a reality she wasn’t even remotely ready to deal with. Too in love with her work. And she knew what it was like, being raised by a single woman. Her own mother had done it.

The things she’d seen in Syria, a war torn country where religions and cultures clashed and broke apart on the teeth of extremism, they’d made her feel dead inside.

Dead enough to seek comfort in the arms of a man she’d had no idea was married.

She hasn’t told Poe, he doesn’t need to know.

For a second she’d considered, what her life could be with him, with a baby.

Hearing Poe Dameron on the phone with his wife and son the night before they were to leave Damascus had dashed cold water on those transient dreams.

She only wishes she’d been strong enough to tell her mother she missed her. That she wishes she’d be small again.

Small enough to need protection from the realities of the world.

Now that she’s older, it's easier to run.

She is terrible at many things, but running away from her problems, she has refined to an art.

So she runs.

* * *

Essaouira is beautiful.

From the ramparts on the bay, she can see Mogador island across the shimmering waters. Salty winds from the ocean warm and strong.

There’s a lot of surfers in the bay, from everywhere, locals and expats.

It's calm. Quiet. There’s none of the glam and lights that she’d seen in Casablanca, the noises and smells of the souks in Marrakech.

Just an old medina, white and sun bleached, and the shimmering blue sea.

There are a lot of really good pictures to take in Essaouira.

She stays a week, trying to secure a desert guide to take her south.

It's a lot harder than she’d expected, whining about it to the pretty girl mixing drinks at the hotel’s bar.

Her hair is all wild, sun bleached curls and her eyes darker than night, rimmed in black lashes and kohl. She surfs every morning, her brown arms and shoulders sun-kissed and corded with muscle.

She’s beautiful in the black and white photos she takes of her while she works.

“Can you believe this Nesrine…I have all the budget I could ever need, and five weeks, and no one wants to take me down unless it's the touristy route!” Rey groans between two sips of ice cold local beer.

“It's dangerous down there you know? A good guide is hard to find…” Nesrine replies, sympathetic to her plight, shrugging her pretty shoulders, “I told you, it would be a lot easier in Algeria. Do you want another beer?”

“Yes, please. Maybe I should head over there…”

Nesrine tilts the glass to the mouth of the tap with practiced ease. She’s been doing this for years, her uncle owns the hotel.

“Do you know what, I’ll ask uncle if he can recommend anyone. Maybe he’d know someone…sometimes I feel like there isn’t anyone he doesn’t know, actually. It's a pain when they all show up here for free drinks…”

Nesrine’s uncle, Amine, wears sunglasses indoors and his jeans always look pristine. He’s funny and welcoming, his accent is easy going, southern France consonants. He’d been born in Marseilles, on the coast, but fate brought him back to his ancestor’s land.

And as it happened, he did know of a guy.

“He’s a little strange you know, ex-military and all, but he’s very reliable and he’ll take you anywhere, for a reasonable fee. And he’ll keep you safe, he knows the desert like his back pocket. A lot of clients of mine used his services and were very pleased. He’s not chatty but he’s good.”

Honestly, she really didn’t care if the guy was chatty or not, only if he took her where she wanted to go.

“And where can I find this guy?”

“Algiers. I’ll dig out his email for you…”

He starts thumbing through his phone, sucking at his bottom lip through his teeth.

“What’s his name?”

Amine looks up, grinning, teeth gleaming white.

“I was forgetting about that wasn’t I? Solo. Ben Solo.”

* * *

Ben Solo is really polite in his emails.

Great grammar, american English, nothing too ornate or out of place, words bare boned.

He asks for a small advance, which is customary when exchanging services, and she wires the money over his account before taking the earliest flight to Algiers.

Rey really hopes he doesn’t just pocket the money and leave her high and dry, as some less reputable guides are known to, but she trusts Nesrine’s uncle and his recommendation.

There’s an email waiting when she lands, asking that she meet him the next morning at a cafe near the hotel she booked for the weekend.

She spends the evening at a nearby hammam, washing the weariness of travel out of her bones. A woman with pretty eyes and two young daughters offers to wash her hair and she accepts, letting the kind hands work out the knots in the long chestnut lengths. It's a good touch, gentle, healing.

The last time a stranger had touched her, it had been for her procedure. The hands had been infinitely kind then too, but for the sake of sparing her pain.

It will take time to heal the wound she refuses to fully address yet, but the careful, skilled hands of the mother in the hammam help, if just a little bit.

* * *

Her first impression of Ben Solo is that he’s  _ tall _ .

Taller than most people in the cafe, boldly muscled and broad shouldered, easily picked out in the crowd. She’d expected southern features from his name, the moniker latin, but nothing could quite prepare her for the sheer beauty of his face. Regal and a little leonine, the set of his liquid bronze eyes and nose sharp and beautiful, his full mouth pink and soft. His skin is pale gold and dotted with freckles and beauty marks, long dark hair tied back haphazardly. There’s a thin scar across the right side of his face, bisecting cheek and brow. It’s not disfiguring, if anything, it sublimates his features, makes him even more strikingly beautiful.

She’s never done fashion photography but her eye for angles tells her that if he was so inclined, he could be a sought after model. She already imagines him in her photographs, perfect face and all.

He wears a white long sleeved henley and a  _ keffiyeh _ around his neck, well worn khakis. Despite the startling paleness of his skin, the regal set of his bold features, he looks right at home, like he belongs with the locals ordering strong espressos at the cafe’s counter.

She meanders through the crowd to reach him and when he notices her, calls out her name questioningly.

“Rey Niima?”

His voice is incredibly low and soft, but it carries strength, hidden underneath a veneer of velvet.

“Thats me.” she replies, getting to the counter, offering her hand, “You must be Ben?”

He takes the offered hand in his much bigger one. His fingers are long and agile, his grip firm. His mouth curls up a fraction.

“That would be me. I ordered us both coffee already, let's grab a table.” he offers, already walking and she grins as she follows him to a small wrought iron table by the open window.

He’s used to taking charge. She likes that.

His accent is sweet, midwestern drawl.

She’s heard many accents in her lifetime, and she’s gotten fairly good at locating them.

They sit and the coffee comes in an ornate copper pot, flavoured with green cardamom and orange blossom water. Ben pours it in the two small cups, hers first, with an ease that speaks of long practice.

He picks up the small cup with his left hand and that’s when she notices that the first phalange of his pinky and ring fingers are missing.

She notices, but knows better than to ask.

“So, if I understood correctly, you want to go see some desert?” he asks after a sip of the burning hot, fragrant coffee.

“That’s the idea, yeah.”

“What’s in it for you?”

He’s straight to the point and once again she is pleasantly surprised.

“I want to take photographs, for a personal project of mine.”

He shrugs his shoulders, satisfied with her answer.

“You work for a press agency right? You get published at all or…”

She laughs, takes a sip of her own coffee.

“National Geographic rings a bell? Time Magazine?”

It's his turn to laugh, soft and fluted.

“That famous hmm? I guess I better show you the nice places. Give me a day to get all the supplies and get you an estimate of the costs. How long do you want to go for?”

“I have five weeks, if that works for you.”

He nods, black hair escaping it's tie to fall across his eyes.

“Its my off season right now, it's not very touristy so I have plenty of time. Let me get things together and I’ll be contacting you tomorrow in the morning.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Ben Solo nods, finishing his coffee as he stands from the chair.

The hems of his khakis are rolled up, and instead of skin, his left ankle reflects grey and black.

Carbon fibre. A fancy prosthetic.

The bottom of his left leg is missing, probably amputated under the knee.

“See you tomorrow then.”

There is no limp, no hesitation in his step when he disappears through the crowd.

She wonders if she’d been staring too much.

* * *

Ben Solo is efficient.

He texts her the next morning with a list of supplies and their cost, stuff she should buy for herself, and an itinerary.

He meets her again at the cafe downstairs, orders coffee and sweets at the counter for both of them in an Arabic that would make most locals proud. It's much better than hers, musical and smooth, lilting like birdsong in his low voice. 

His French is great too, textbook neat.

They grab a seat outside this time, in the shade of a parasol.

She tries not to look at his left leg, showing beneath the hem of his cuffed khakis, curiosity burning at her tongue.

She is a journalist by trade, and it's hard for her not to get to the bottom of things like she’s been trained. Curiosity is a skill in her line of work, and it's been a problem in her personal life more than once. The last thing she wants to do is to offend the only guide that will take her to the desert with her prodding questions so she lets them die in her mouth while he extricates a map out of his pocket and lays it on the table.

“So what I’ve decided is that we’re gonna take a jeep and drive down to Tamanrasset, right in desert country, and go explore the mountain ranges in the nearby national park. Temperatures are pretty hot this time of year but the landscape is definitely worth it.”

“What is it called?”

“In Berbère or in Tuareg?” he asks, dead serious.

She’s at a loss for words. She had no idea he spoke both.

“ _ Idurar Uhaggar, _ that's Tuareg.  _ Idurar n Ahaggar _ , that's Berbère. The difference is slight but better not to mix them up.” he replies, rather cryptically.

There’s that odd streak that Amine had told her about.

“When do we leave?” she asks, eager to just get moving.

“Tomorrow if you want.”

“Perfect.”

* * *

There are no words to describe the beauty of the Saharan desert.

White dunes, black basalt formations, striations in sand as fine as powdered sugar.

It gets in everything, the sand. In her hair and her clothes, and sometimes in her coffee but she doesn’t mind it too much.

Her camera will need a thorough cleaning when she gets back to England.

“You can’t be a princess when you report on armed conflicts in the middle east.” She’d told Ben after she’d picked up a scorpion crawling on her leg bare handed and tossed it away during their lunch break.

She’d been taught how to grab them by the tail and flick them off before they could pinch by Iraqi locals on one of her assignments, and the trick had come in handy.

“I don’t think a princess would go off gallivanting in the desert on her own either.” Ben had replied, one of his elusive smiles lifting the corners of his lips.

He was  _ very _ beautiful when he smiled, she’d noticed.

They take turns driving the white jeep on the dusty, unpaved roads, nothing around for miles, and when it's her turn, he easily falls asleep in the seat beside her.

Not very chatty, Amine had said, true to his word.

She doesn’t mind.

It takes two days to get to Tamanrasset, where Ben has procured lodgings for the two of them.

In the same room.

They’re staying with a widow and her brother, both of them warm and kind, renting the spare rooms of their large home to tourists of all kinds.

“I told them we’re married.” Ben explains, smiling at her slightly shocked expression, “Trust me, it's a lot easier that way. Sometimes they won’t rent to a mixed gender couple if they’re not married. I think our hosts are fairly open minded but I didn’t want to risk it.”

It's somewhat unexpected, too used to travelling on her own, but she’s not about to complain about a real bed, no matter how thin the mattress. It's big enough for the two of them, but he offers to sleep on the couch.

“There’s plenty of room on the bed, Ben.”

He seems more uncomfortable than she is.

In the middle of the night she wakes up because he’s thrashing in the sheets, talking, his tone urgent but she can’t make out the words, too fast.

He’s speaking  _ Dari _ . Afghan Persian, the words coming back to her but too hazy to decipher.

She touches his arm to get him out of his nightmare and he springs up, nearly knocking her over, sweat drenched and shaky.

“Are you okay?” she asks, and he looks at her with the eyes of someone who has seen terrible things.

Things that chase him in his sleep.

She’s seen that haunted look so many times she can recognize it in a heartbeat.

She’s seen it in war-worn soldiers, in civilians that have lost everything. In the eyes of children that have never known a day of peace in their lives.

She has to repeat the question twice before his brain registers.

He wipes his forehead with the back of his sleeve, blinking away sleep wearily, looking older than his years.

He’d gone to bed fully dressed and he’s drenched in cold sweat.

“I’m alright.” he replies, sounding exhausted and shaken but his pale face is resigned.

He gets up from the thin mattress, shivering.

“I’m alright, Rey.” he repeats, self-assured this time, “Go back to sleep, I’m just gonna go drink some water.

She listens to him ambling over to the attached bathroom, water running for a few seconds.

The home they’re in has the luxury of running water, it's tepid and murky but they both know better than to waste it.

She hears him gulp down the glass, heavy, laboured breaths. The symptoms are easy to recognize.

Post traumatic stress disorder.

Probably never treated, like most soldiers she’s known.

The army knows how to treat the wounds of the body, but the wounds of the mind, they’re something else altogether.

* * *

Ben doesn’t say much the next morning.

If anything he’s even less chatty than usual, drinking the hot mint tea offered by their host in pensive silence.

They spend the afternoon in the souks, buying a few more supplies, mostly food.

Dried rice, millet, sun dried tomatoes, dates and almonds.

He takes her to a jewelry stand.

“Pick some trinkets to give to women and children at the settlements, it's a lot easier to get along if you follow tradition with a host gift or two. I’ll be right back…” he instructs, before disappearing in the crowd.

She shrugs. Picks a little bit of everything, pretty stones, silver amulets, chains, ribbons. A pretty bracelet for her mother.

There’s a necklace too, that she would love for herself, but it's a little out of her price range. She haggles with the man at the counter, in a mixture of Arabic and French but they cannot reach an agreement.

Ben arrives as she walks away from the stand with her purchases, telling the seller that maybe tomorrow he’d change his mind.

The old man laughs, waves at her.

“You got everything you need?” Ben asks and she nods.

“Everything but that silver necklace. The old man and I couldn’t agree on a price.” she explains, shrugging.

Ben nods, pulling a roll of dark blue fabric from underneath his arm.

“I got you a little something.”

He unwinds the long piece of lightweight cotton and drapes it over her head and shoulders, a few skilled twists holding it in place. Arranging it around her face with delicate touches that make her entire body feel wired up.

“It's an  _ Alasho. _ It will keep the sun away from your face and protect you from the sand.”

She feels her cheeks burn at the kindness. It's a sweet gesture and she’s not used to that kind of attention.

“Thank you.” she mumbles and he grins, the expression touching his beautiful eyes, “Is that what the Tuareg wear?” she asks as they start walking back to the house.

“No, men wear the  _ Tagelmust _ . It's a sacred piece of clothing that only men can wear after they come of age. The blue dye is more concentrated and it leeches on their skin. The darker the better. Maybe we’ll see some when we head out tomorrow.”

Their hosts serve them couscous that night, a feast of chicken and lamb, seasoned with fennel and spices. She eats as much as she can fit in her stomach, knowing that for the next three weeks, all she’ll be eating will be rice and dates, for the most part.

Ben has dreams again that night.

He wakes on his own, breathing hard and fast, and Rey pretends she’s still asleep.

She doesn’t think he’s ready for comfort of any kind. She wishes she could offer some when she hears him cry through the bathroom door.

* * *

He looks tired the next morning.

They drink coffee at dawn and head out of Tamanrasset in Ben’s trusty jeep, loaded with supplies, northeast. Towards the Tuareg settlement of Mertoutek and then lower down south in the mountains.

They skip on the settlement, driving further in the desert.

It's on the long winding road that Ben decides to talk, after more than a day in relative silence where she’d climbed up dunes to take the best shot.

“We have a few weeks ahead of us, I might as well get to know you a little bit…”

He says it out of nowhere, and it takes her by surprise enough that she thinks she might have imagined it.

“What?”

“I want to get to know you a little bit. Tell me stuff about you.” he asks, simply.

“Where to start?” she replies, laughing a little.

“Your childhood. It's always a good start.”

Her childhood was nothing special, in its own way.

“I was born in London. My mom is Swedish but she grew up in Switzerland and my dad’s parents were Lebanese and Spanish, respectively.”

“Ah. It explains your eyes and skin…”

“My eyes?”

“I’ve never seen eyes quite like yours. The shape, like almonds, the green gold…they’re really beautiful. And that golden, freckled skin.”

There isn’t any flattery in his tone, he’s just stating the facts as he sees them and yet, they make her face feel hot and flushed.

“Thanks…”

“It's the truth.”

They’re quiet for a few minutes, but then Ben turns to her again.

“Tell me more.”

She takes a sip of lukewarm water.

“I didn’t get to know my dad very much, he left when I was young. Too young for me to remember him all that much. My mom raised me, she’s an archivist at the British Library. We never wanted for anything, and I was a pretty quiet child. I did alright in school, I was independent at a young age. Every winter we’d take a vacation to see my uncle in Switzerland, go ski in the alps. I think that's when I started getting interested in photography.”

“Your uncle?”

“He had a camera collection. I was fascinated with it, he let me play with everything. My mom got me a polaroid camera when I turned 10 and I’ve never looked back since.”

“And then?”

“I went for a student exchange, when I was 16. I went to a French college, and then Spain. I never went back to London. I studied Journalism at the Sorbonne on a scholarship, and when I was done I packed my bags and travelled everywhere I could afford to shoot stuff. Anything.” 

“You travelled a lot?”

“I freelanced for two years before my work got picked up. A story about the slums in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the  _ favelas _ . I spent almost a year living in Rocinha, Cidade de Deus, Santa Teresa…fearing for my life mostly. My apartment got broken in three times, I was threatened by drug lords, but somehow I felt like my place was there. I had to stay. Just taking the pulse of the people, the workers and the families, and the kids running the streets. The violence…there was a lot of misery and violence in the favelas. But there was a lot of beauty too. And I guess the editors saw it too.”

“They collaborated with you after that?”

She nods, remembering her first travels.

“I freelanced but they would fund my adventures a little bit. And then I became a regular collaborator, they sent me to cover the stuff that most people didn’t want to. When they asked me to go cover the Iraq war…”

She notices his shoulders tensing at the words. It's subtle, and quickly subdued.

“I just couldn’t say no. I’ve been covering middle eastern war zones ever since. I’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan, Lebanon, Gaza…”

“I’ve been there too. Iraq, and Afghanistan.”

She leans back in her seat, taking another sip of water. Her eyes land on his left hand and its shortened fingers.

“You should tell me a little about you too.” she prods, gently.

“Maybe later.” he replies, straightening up, “The sun is gonna set soon and we need to put the tent together. Set up camp.”

It isn’t a flat out refusal.

Maybe her curiosity will be satisfied, sometime. She knows better than to rush him.

Ben finds a suitable spot in a valley, surrounded by striated boulders that break the cool desert wind.

She finds it startling how low the temperature drops when the sun disappears.

Ben sets the tent efficiently while she gets a fire going, bundling up in her alasho veil.

Dinner is rice, dried tomatoes and dates. Mint tea with sugar.

There is no light pollution in the Sahara, the sky as black as ink and more stars than one can count in a lifetime. She lays back on the woven mat she’d set by the fire to cook the food, tries to pick out constellations she knows but there are so many. Too many.

“What are you doing?” he asks, sounding amused.

“Stargazing.” she replies, “There’s so many stars here…I’m trying to see constellations that I know.”

She’s a little startled when Ben scoots over beside her, cradling his cup of tea with one hand while the other points at the stars.

“You can see the same constellations as you would further north, it's just that they’re in different places. See.” He points to a cluster, close to the horizon line, “That’s Orion.”

Now that he points it out, she locates the belt, reorienting her line of sight to catch the others. Lyra, the Dippers, the North Star.

He lays beside her on the mat, heads nearly touching.

“When I was a kid, my cousins and I, we’d lay down in the fields and look at the stars all night long if we could get away with it.”

“How many cousins do you have?”

“Two on my mother’s side, both older than me. We spent a lot of time together, since I didn’t have any siblings.”

There’s comfortable silence, the crackling of the wood fire beside them the only sound.

“I was born in San Diego. My parents are second generation Russian immigrants, my mom was an attorney and my dad a mechanic, but when I turned three, they quit their jobs in the city and bought a farm in corn country.”

“The midwest?”

“Arkansas. The American dream. I played soccer and baseball, ran in the cornfields, played with my mom’s pet chickens, and horses. My parents still have the farm, my dad and uncle take care of it nowadays.”

“And you? What got you here?”

There’s a slight pause, fingers toying with the cup resting on his chest.

“I wasn’t that good in school. I was more interested in sports but not quite enough to get a scholarship out of it. I was pretty good at playing piano, my mom giving me lessons as early as she could, but I didn’t think the conservatory was for me. I decided to join the Marine Corps, went back to San Diego for training, and survived it. My dad was so proud.”

The quintessential American story, she muses. The son of immigrants protecting and serving his country.

“You got deployed?”

“My first time in 2004, Iraq, I’d just turned 18. Operation Vigilant Resolve, in April we took the city of Fallujah. I was there in November too, for Phantom Fury. I saw all the fighting in Ramadi, where I was stationed.”

“How was it…I mean, I know how war is, what it does to people. I’ve been there. But how was it for you?”

Ben sighs. His arm touches hers in the darkness.

“I’d never seen much violence in my life, and all of a sudden I was holding an M16 rifle right in the middle of it. It was a harsh wake up call. But it became my reality and my training had made me desensitized to it. That's why the Marines training is so rough, they take you apart to put you back together again so you can resist pain, fatigue, emotions. It was a shock when I came back home in 2006, it was just like…I wasn’t  _ made _ for real life anymore. I couldn’t sleep, I had nightmares constantly. I snapped. I was useless out of the war zone.”

The PTSD had already damaged him then.

“What did you do?”

“I went to Quantico, to perfect my training, and then I was deployed to Afghanistan, in 2008. Again in 2009 for Operation Strike of the Sword, in June. Then there was the battle of Marjah, in February 2010.”

There’s a heavy pause then, and she feels on slippery ground. She knows the worst is yet to come and she wants to know but she’s loath to push him further than he can go.

“You know, we can stop here if you want. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to…”

She’d held his hand in his sleep the night before, when he was having another nightmare, waking him out of it with a gentle squeeze.

She’d seen the thankfulness in his eyes when she’d handed him the water canteen and gone back to sleep without prodding him for answers.

“I think…I think you deserve to know it's just that I haven’t talked about this with anyone for so long. I don’t usually…”

He pauses again, sighing.

“When I guide people for desert tours, I usually don’t sleep in the same tent or rooms as my clients because they’re usually couples or groups. They never get to see this. But you have. And I see you looking at my hand and my leg and I can see the questions going through your head but you don’t ask anything. I appreciate you letting me do this on my terms.”

He sits up on the mat and she follows suit. Watches him roll the hem of his khakis up to the knee.

His leg is amputated just underneath the knee joint, his prosthesis gleaming black and silver in the warm firelight.

“It was in March. We’d secured a road going north and I was with a supply convoy, heading back to Marjah where things were still unstable. We hadn’t encountered much trouble but then as we neared a fork in the road, we got caught in enemy crossfire. Our humvee was hit by a mortar. I was driving it, and my left fingers were blown off. They managed to reattach everything except my two last phalanges. They were too damaged to save.”

He gives her his left hand, palm up, and she can see where the surgeons stitched him back, thin white lines at the junction of palm and fingers. Mangled lines in the palm too, where the flesh was burned and torn.

“Shrapnel hit me right in the face, its pure luck that I still have my right eye. Two of my colleagues died instantly in the conflagration, but I was blessed enough to be saved by the tail of the convoy who hadn’t been touched. They pulled me out of the humvee carcass covered in second degree burns, and my left leg was completely useless. I didn’t want to look because I couldn’t feel anything. I knew right there and then that my foot was gone. I was airlifted to base quickly but they still had to amputate. I’m lucky I still have my knee joint.”

She fights the urge to touch him.

She wants to, because what he’s telling her is horrifying and she wants to comfort him but she knows that she can’t even begin to imagine the pain he must’ve felt. The horrors he’s seen from his side of the war.

The last thing she wants to do is to patronize him with uninvited touches.

“It took me a year to learn to walk again. I was discharged from the military, given a pension plan. I had served their purpose so they got rid of me, pretty much. Left me in a state where I couldn’t go back to civilian life because of the things I’d seen and lived. I moved to Algiers and became a guide, using the survival skills I’d learned in the marines. It was the only way I found to make peace with the desert.”

She takes a slow breath. It's a lot to take at once.

“Has it worked? Have you made your peace.”

He stands up, face and hands kissed with firelight, his overgrown hair falling across his eyes.

“With the desert, yes. With the war? I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to.”

* * *

That night Ben doesn’t dream.

His sleep is undisturbed, body lax and breathing even.

His eyes are sleepy when he makes coffee on the fire’s embers, but the usual tension in his shoulders is gone, and he laughs a little when he yawns.

“That made my jaw crack…” he snorts and she laughs along.

They drink their coffee watching the sun rise high and hot on the white horizon.

The sand is like a shimmering white sea.

After a few dates and leftover rice, Ben unfurls the satellite map on the hood of the white jeep, pulls a chewed pencil out of his shirt pocket.

He makes a little circle around an outcrop.

“So we are here. I suggest we drive up here…” he sketches a neat line, through the mountains, draws another circle, “There’s a lot of huge sand dunes there, I think you’ll be able to take nice shots. We can set up camp there, and then there’s an  _ oued _ , an oasis nearby, with a Tuareg settlement. They’re pretty friendly. I've been there before.”

“Sounds like a plan.” she replies, “How long of a drive?”

Ben rolls up the map, and then reaches over to arrange the alasho around her neck properly, a little smile on his lips that makes her heart race.

“About two days. You know, you have to learn how to fix your veil someday, I can’t always be there to do it for you.” he teases.

“But I  _ like _ it when you do it for me.” she replies, maybe in a tone more flirtatious than originally intended.

Ben laughs, gently squeezes her shoulder. His hand is so large on her body.

“Noted.” he replies, in the same tone and something in the pit of her stomach roils to life.

It takes her breath away.

* * *

Ben was right about the dunes.

They’re impressive and beautiful. They spend two days exploring them, getting the jeep stuck and laughing as they constantly dig it out of the sand.

At night they look at the stars, lying side by side on the woven mat, arms touching.

Many times during the early days of their travels, her thoughts would go back to the desolation of Syria, of her weeks in Istanbul trying to erase the damage, and the urge to run would press at her ribcage.

Alone in the desert with Ben, she was starting to heal. The urges fewer and far between.

She notices Ben is more relaxed too, and he doesn’t have as many nightmares either. It's not perfect yet, but she feels like the beauty around them is helping them heal.

Unless it's each other’s company, but to think about the budding attraction she feels towards Ben Solo is venturing on slippery ground.

The last time she’d had feelings for a volatile man in the desert, she’d ended up crying her eyes out in a dark room in Damascus clutching a positive pregnancy test.

She tries not to think about it too much, and to ignore the lust roiling in her belly when she watches him split wood for the night’s fire, linen shirt wrapped around his waist. Arms flexing as they bring the axe down.

Strong muscle and pale gold skin, freckled on the shoulders.

In the tent that night he turns to face her on the mattress, smiles sleepily.

“I know you’re paying me for this but it really doesn’t feel like work…”

“Is that a compliment?”

He smiles wider, eyes closing.

“It is.”

* * *

They’re out exploring the dunes on foot when Ben suddenly freezes at the top of a rocky outcrop.

She reaches him as he looks out east, where a line of darkness has formed on the horizon.

For the very first time in their travels, he looks concerned.

“Is everything okay?”

“I really don’t like the look of that dark line…Do you have the binoculars?”

She fishes them out of her backpack and hands them over.

He looks out to the horizon again and curses.

The word sounds so out of place in his pretty voice it makes her jump.

“It's a  _ Simoom _ , a dust storm. We have to head back, quickly…”

Thankfully they’re not too far from camp, but the storm is moving fast, burning hot winds already lifting the sand up as they race to the relative shelter of their tent.

He’s ahead and already she loses sight of him, the dust burning her eyes.

The flying sand and dust obscures the sun and she finds herself in near darkness, panic and adrenaline rushing through her.

He doubles back and takes her hand in his, guiding her along.

“Don’t let go of me okay?” he yells over the roaring of the wind.

They reach camp and he goes for the tent, anchored to the back of the jeep.

“Get inside!” he orders, going back to make sure everything is anchored properly before sliding in.

“Why the tent and not the jeep?” she asks, panic bubbling in the pit of her stomach as the wind outside only howls louder.

“If we get buried, we can cut the roof of the tent and get out. In the jeep we could suffocate and die.” he replies, reaching around the tent for the water canteens.

His words do little to soothe her and she starts thinking that a vacation in the unpredictable desert was not her finest idea. And he sees it, the panic in her eyes and he pauses whatever he was doing, takes her face in his hands,

“Hey, look at me. Look into my eyes.” he asks, gently and she complies.

His eyes are dark and beautiful, so calm.

“Were gonna be okay. We're gonna get out of this just  _ fine _ . Breathe.”

She takes a deep breath, and another.

“It's not my first storm out here, we’ll do great okay?”

“Okay.”

He smiles, reassuringly as he lets go.

Outside the wind is roaring, and she can feel the heat of it seeping through the tent walls, the sand wearing at the fabric.

He grabs a loose end of her alasho and soaks it with water, drapes it carefully around her face, covering her mouth and nose.

“The humidity in the air is gonna drop dramatically and the heat will rise. You have to inhale through your nose, exhale through the mouth, okay? Those storms usually don’t last very long but let's put all the chances on our side alright?” he instructs, wetting his own alasho and wrapping it around his face as he lays down on the mattress.

“Come lay with me.” he instructs and she obeys, scooting close to his chest while he covers them both completely with a woven blanket.

It dulls the sound from the outside, and he holds her close enough for her to feel his breathing against her forehead, even and calm.

“Don’t let go of me. Whatever happens, don’t let go.” he asks, murmuring against her skin through the soaked veil and she nods, unable to find her words.

It lasts for what seems like hours, the adrenaline making her hyper aware of how he feels against her. Hard muscle and warmth, big hands splayed on her back. She fits well against his much taller body.

His even breathing is soothing, slowing hers to match his helps dispel most of the panic wracking her body, especially when the heat in the tent climbs so high she feels like they’re being roasted alive.

She holds onto him until the wind is only whispering outside.

He pushes off the blanket and feels the walls of the tent.

“I don’t think we’re buried too much…”

He pushes the alasho down his face and finds the canteen again, offering her some water first.

It's stale and warm but after what they’ve just been through, it couldn’t be more delicious on her parched tongue.

He takes a long sip too, blinking away the sweat in his eyes.

“Lets see if we're good out there…”

He starts to unzip the door and a little bit of sand filters in. He opens the top of the door first to peek out.

“Looks like there’s only a foot of sand around the tent, it really wasn’t too bad…” he announces, clearly relieved as he opens most of the door to get out.

Outside, the landscape has changed. It's like dunes were moved in different places.

The sky is as blue and cloudless as it had been earlier in the day before the storm.

They’ve been lucky.

Their poor jeep, however, shielded them from most of the sand, its front buried fairly deep.

“Well, that's a bother…” Ben sighs, reaching for the shovels in the cab, “It's gonna take forever to get it out of here.”

“Better start now I guess.” she replies, taking a shovel of her own.

They push around the sand until most of the front is freed, late in the afternoon, but when Ben climbs in to start the engine, they are faced with another problem.

The jeep won’t start.

“Well, I don’t know what it is. Either the engine overheated, or the filter is full of sand and blocking the engine intake.”

“What should we do?” she asks, feeling exhausted and dry all over.

She’d kill for a cool shower right this minute.

“I think that we’re both tired. Night is gonna fall in an hour or so. We should camp out here and relax, eat something, and tomorrow I’ll see what our options are.” Ben offers.

It's a sound proposition.

She has a hard time not falling asleep in her bowl of rice and lentils.

They sleep close together that night.

She wakes at one point, because she feels overheated and she realizes that Ben’s chest is pressed against her back, the tip of his nose underneath her ear, dead to the world.

His arm falls heavily over her waist.

She’s overheated, but wouldn’t want to wake him for all the money in the world. So she stays still, and tries desperately to quiet the feelings blooming in her heart.

* * *

In the morning, Ben’s thoughts are clearer.

He has made no mention of how they’d woken up earlier, entangled together in the blankets, both of them flushed and quiet.

He makes coffee and they sit on the mat by the fire while he explains his plan.

“So the oasis settlement is not too far, five or six kilometres south of here. We can head out on foot with light equipment and probably make it by nightfall. Over there they’ll have camels and if we’re lucky, another jeep to tow ours. It's the best plan I could think of.”

She takes a sip of bittersweet coffee and nods.

“I don’t think we could make things worse by doing that.” she replies, “Let’s pack a few things and get going.”

They’ve been trekking for an hour when dark silhouettes detach themselves from the horizon line. For a second she is worried about another storm, but as they get closer, they realize its people.

People mounted on camels.

That doesn’t guarantee safety. She’d seen Ben strapping the rifle on his back, making sure it was loaded with easy, fast gestures.

He probably could operate most firearms blindfolded. It was at once reassuring and terrifying.

As the mounted men get closer, Ben grows more relaxed. Tuareg men, their deep indigo tagelmust standing out against the white sand and beige pelts of their mounts.

Ben greets them with broad hand gestures and they holler back, dismounting to come meet them.

Two men, fairly young, and one of them seems to know Ben, from the way he comes nearly jogging to hug him, the two of them chatting animatedly in a language her ear doesn’t quite know yet.

_ Tamahaq _ , the dialect of Algerian Tuaregs.

Ben has shown her the greetings however, stressing the importance of them for the Tuareg, and she provides them gracefully when Ben’s friend asks for introductions.

She’s relieved when the friend, Tariq, speaks perfect French to her, laughing at her obvious relief.

“Everyone speaks French at the oued, worry not…” he teases, his smile very white in his sun bronzed face.

Tariq has a spare camel, and she’s relieved that they’ll be riding back to the oasis rather than walk on the blazing hot sand.

The animal is docile, with long fluttery lashes, huffing when both she and Ben settle on her back, her gait measured and slow, swaying, easy to follow with her body.

Ben doesn’t have to guide the reins too much, the camel knows where she’s going, and the back and forth combined with the midday sun and Ben’s lilting conversation with Tariq soon lulls her to sleep.


	2. Recovery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here's the rest of it...psst psst: it's the explicit bits. Enjoy!

* * *

The oasis settlement is _ nothing _ like she’d imagined.

There are palm trees, date palms actually, and little houses with flat roofs.

Unbelievably luxuriant.

Goats, chickens and horses, children playing soccer in the dust and every afternoon Ben joins them, laughing and running with all of them, coming back to the goatskin tent Tariq has loaned them dusty and smiling.

No one makes a big deal about his leg here, and there’s a layer of self-consciousness lifted off his persona.

They all know him at the oued. They call him  _ Ayrad _ . Lion.

“It's because of my hair…” he explains, running fingers through his lush ebony locks, blushing a little.

It suits him. Maybe more than he thinks.

They’d towed the jeep back to the settlement, and the local mechanic made his priority of getting it back to running condition.

“Give me ten days.” he’d asked Ben.

So they wait, and she takes pictures.

She takes rolls and rolls of film. Polaroids too, giving some out to the families she photographs.

The women with their beautiful beaded garments, tattooed faces, and the men draped in veils.

The children playing soccer.

More photographs than she’s ever  _ dreamed  _ of taking.

Ben is more relaxed than ever, laughing and talking more than she’s seen him do in three weeks. The way he looks at her has changed too, and she wonders if she’s imagining it.

She’s offered the luxury of a bath one afternoon, graciously prepared by the other women, who’d been charmed by her gifts, the little pendants and chains, the pretty stones and rolls of ribbon.

“A  _ bath! _ ” she yells, looking at the shallow basin filled with fragrant water they installed in her tent with the same excitement she would a hot-tub at a five star hotel.

The women laugh, Tariq’s wife most of all.

“You look like you need it…” she explains, helping her out of her alasho.

“You have no idea…”

“Tonight we feast, it can only be proper if our guest feels clean and comfortable for a celebration.”

“What are we celebrating?”

Tariq’s wife smiles, in a way that is both teasing and secretive.

“Ayrad’s visit of course…”

She luxuriates in the water far longer than necessary, washing her hair, shaving her legs.

Stuff that many people take for granted, but after weeks without washing properly, it feels like true luxury.

She’s borrowed a bit of kohl for her eyes, and her long hair has been brushed.

There’s two clean pieces of clothing in her backpack, a white raw silk tunic and black leggings, and she decides that it will have to do.

It falls loose on her body, weeks of rice and dates whittling away at the roundness of her hips.

Ben comes to the tent to accompany her to the feast, and he’s cleaned up too, his hair falling thick and glossy on his broad shoulders.

He’s beautiful.

His face relaxed and his smile easy and unprompted.

“You’re gorgeous.” he says, softly, getting close enough to take her hand in his, briefly, just enough for her cheeks to burn, “But something’s missing…”

He pulls a velvet bag out of his jeans pocket.

“What's that?” she asks, excitedly and he reaches in the bag, pulling out the silver necklace she’d wanted in Tamanrasset.

A pretty amulet, on a long chain, that he drapes around her neck with careful fingers, lifting her hair out of the way.

She feels like her heart wants to burst out of her chest.

“Ben…when did you get it?”

He smiles, brushing a strand of her hair away from her forehead.

“The morning before we left. I just…I just thought you should have it. I was waiting for the right time…”

“I don’t know what to say…”

He takes her hand, tugs her out in the night playfully.

“Then don’t say anything. Let's go eat…”

* * *

There is more food than she’s had in weeks, and her shrunken stomach has a hard time taking much of it but she makes it her task to taste everything.

The rich stews and the millet bread, the tangy goat cheese and the sweetest dates.

There’s music too, and women dance in the firelight.

Ben has brought some  _ arak _ , aniseed spirits from a trip to Lebanon, carefully hidden in his bags. Alcohol is hard to find in North Africa, and their tuareg hosts are definitely pleased with the gift, passing around little glasses of the strong spirit mixed with water, turning it milky white.

The drink aromatic and strong, burning down her throat and going straight to her head.

Ben is not doing any better holding his drink, laughing loud, slurring his French a little bit in a way both endearing and hilarious.

She suspects he’s a bit of a lightweight, muscle and height notwithstanding.

His cheeks are flushed and his eyes glowing and she takes pictures, snaps away knowing they won’t do his beauty justice but wanting to remember it all the same.

She wants this night engraved in her memory.

They sit close together, too close almost, and at one point the spirits make the world spin, the fire burns brighter and she leans her head on his shoulder.

His shoulder is warm, his hair soft. He smells like woodsmoke and clean skin, and she feels intoxicated by it in the  _ best _ possible way.

The women and men sing beautifully and she closes her eyes to listen.

“Are you tired?” Ben whispers in her ear.

“A little bit. The world is spinning…I haven’t had alcohol in weeks.”

“Want to head back to the tent? I’m a little woozy too actually…”

She feels her pulse soar.

“Sure.”

They’re both a little unsteady on their feet, but Ben holds her upright with an arm around her waist, laughing at their clumsy steps.

Every touch makes her body tingle in response.

They stumble to the tent and find that their bedding has been readied by some unknown benefactor, an oil lamp hanging from the rafters.

She tumbles down on the woven mats, rolling onto her back, feeling the whole world spin behind her eyelids, feeling mildly euphoric.

This night has been amazing, this entire trip amazing and she could almost forget that five weeks ago she was in Turkey feeling like her world was ending.

She feels the mattress dip beside her and opens her eyes.

Ben is sitting in the tangle of sheets beside her, observing her with an expression that she’s never quite seen in him before. There’s a tenderness to his gaze, and something underneath that’s warmer, wilder when he leans over her, black hair falling across his eyes.

His hand warm on her skin when he tilts her chin up and she feels hypnotized, the euphoria taking over when he leans closer.

Ben kisses her.

It's gentle. It's not rushed, like he’s trying to decipher what she tastes like when his tongue carefully prods at her lower lip.

She opens her mouth, pliant and willing, lust coursing through her veins in a heady rush when he lays on top of her, hips between her thighs.

The weight of his body on hers is perfect, feeling the heat pulse between her legs when the kiss gets heated. His hands tangling in her hair and his hips rolling down, slow, making her feel how aroused he is through the layers of their respective clothing.

He stops, suddenly, pushing off her but she holds him close with her thighs, wrapping them around his waist.

“I don’t know if I’m drunk enough to do this…” he mumbles, and she laughs.

“Should I be offended?” she teases, and he groans, understanding what his words sounded like.

“I want to. I really want to…” he replies, leaning close again, kissing the underside of her jaw and her skin sings at the touch, “You’re beautiful, and I want to make love to you. I’ve been wanting to for a while…” he murmurs against the crook of her neck.

“I want you too…” she sighs, sliding her hands under the hem of his shirt, getting to smooth skin.

“I’m scared.” he murmurs, pausing again, getting up on forearms to lean above her.

He’s too gorgeous for words, cheeks so pink and his lips kiss swollen, “I haven’t been…I haven’t been  _ intimate _ with someone since they took my leg. And I thought alcohol would help with the anxiety but I don’t think it was nearly enough…”

She takes his face in her hands and it surprises him, his eyes widening a fraction.

“Ben. Benjamin Solo, you’re beautiful. Every part of you is beautiful, flesh and carbon fibre alike. Even your soul is beautiful…”

“Damaged…”

“But beautiful all the same. All you have to do is set the pace, and I’ll follow.”

She pulls him down for another kiss and he doesn’t pull away this time, sinks down into her instead, kissing back like his life depended on it.

She’s always been one for urgent, desperate sex. The kind that is performed to forget real life, forget who she is, where she is. Her only focus the body writhing against hers.

Ben is  _ different _ .

There is endless passion in his touch, his beautiful, scarred hands caressing every inch of her bared skin with the devotion reserved to precious objects.

And where his hands go, his soft, skilled mouth is never far behind.

The alcohol has worn off slightly and she focuses on how she feels underneath him, the scent of his skin, the push and pull of strong muscle, the weight of his hips between her thighs.

He’s magnificent in the muted, warm light of the oil lamp.

There are a lot of scars on Ben’s body, and she wants to kiss each and every one, running her fingers down his broad back, across his shoulders when his head dips down her belly.

Kissing a path of burning heat down to the junction of her thighs and she arches, hisses when his lips reach their goal.

Fisting her hands in thick, luscious hair as he licks, sucks, moans against her overheated flesh. He devours her like a man starved, and maybe he is. Starved for desire, for pleasure.

Starved for love, maybe. But that’s dangerous ground to venture on, questioning her own feelings, so she pushes it to the back of her mind, focuses on him, on his mouth making her entire body sing with pleasure.

Her orgasm is a heady rush that makes her entire body tense like an arc and she bucks up, hips clenching but he doesn’t stop caressing her cunt with his tongue until she pleads.

“Ben… _ please _ …” she begs and only then he releases her, kisses his way back up her body.

His back arches when he pushes inside her, easy, with a slow pulse of hips. She’s so ready for him that he buries himself completely in one stroke, despite his size, and his spines clenches.

_ “Fuck _ …” he hisses, pausing above her, holding still while she fights not to squirm, to get more friction.

She’s letting him set the pace, and the last thing she wants is to rush him.

He takes a deep breath, eyes closed, and then smiles as he opens his eyes, looks at her.

“It's gonna sound ridiculous but if I move one inch it will be over before you can even enjoy it. You feel that good.”

She snorts, pulling him down for a kiss.

His mouth is sweet, tastes like her.

“Then just lay still, take it slow.”

He kisses her again and it makes it harder not to move but she resists.

“Are you comfortable like this?” he asks, rubbing her nose with his own.

The gesture is too endearing. Her heart is melting.

“Yes.”

She lets him get his bearings, a few slow inhales and exhales, then there’s a slow, measured thrust and Rey’s entire body soars with it.

Her thighs wrap around his waist as the rhythm of his hips picks up speed, muscles in his lower back clenching underneath her fingers.

He reaches underneath her, cupping her ass with both hands to lift her against him, holding her close enough for her body to get all the friction it needs to pulse with pleasure with each sharp thrust.

His mouth burns against her neck, his breath hot and fast, muffling beautiful moans with her skin.

It doesn’t last long but it doesn’t have to, his body rubbing all the right places against her for her legs to clench and soaring heat to rise between them where they are joined.

“I’m…I’m about to…” she mumbles against his shoulder and he groans in response, feeling her clench around him.

“Yes, oh  _ yes _ … _ please _ …” he begs, hips losing rhythm, erratic.

His orgasm white hot and heady, gasping against her neck and his fingers digging in her flesh as she loses her mind for the second time.

She doesn’t think of Turkey, of that night in Damascus when her life had fallen apart.

There is only Ben and his sated smile, his murmured endearments, the light in his eyes when he leans down to kiss her, sweet and slow, revelling in the intimacy of their still joined bodies.

Her heart beats at her ribcage like a captive bird.

They’re too exhausted to talk in the aftermath, sinking against each other in the tangled sheets.

He covers them both with the heavy blankets, shielding them from the cold and snuggles against her back, curling his body around hers and she feels safe and perfect.

The thought comes out of nowhere, just as she’s falling asleep in comfortable warmth.

_ You’re in love with him. _

She’s too sleepy to decipher if its a by-product of the sex they’ve just had, and then remembers Ben’s words, earlier.

He’d said he wanted to  _ make love _ . Not fuck. Not have sex.

_ Make love. _

Not words men use often. Not in her experience of them anyway.

Words heavy with meaning, for her, warmth spreading in her entire body at the realization that he had done just that, made love to her with the kind of blazing hot passion that she didn’t even think possible.

It had been so much  _ more _ than just a joining of bodies.

She smiles, feeling his arms tight and warm around her waist and his steady breath against the back of her neck.

Maybe the feeling is mutual.

* * *

Her head pounds when she wakes, alone in the sheets.

The coolness of the night is gone, heat already rising and she pushes off the top blanket, stretching her naked body in the sheets.

She feels sore in all the right places, wet heat between her thighs.

Ben shows up just as she wonders where he might have gone, pushing aside the flap of the tent, carrying in the coffee pot.

He’s only wearing jeans, which he takes off as soon as he gets in, blissfully naked again.

Truly unselfconscious of his leg.

He really looks good naked, she decides.

The scent of freshly brewed coffee is a thing of beauty.

“Good morning…” she mumbles.

He smiles as he brings over the pot and two cups, resting them on the floor beside the mattress before sliding in the sheets again, tugging her against him.

Chest to chest, his skin sun warmed.

“Good morning.” he replies, kissing her mouth sweetly, “I thought you might want coffee…”

“How clairvoyant of you. Unless your head hurts as much as mine does and then it's just common sense.” she teases and he winces.

“It does hurt. Alcohol is the devil.” he replies, sitting up just enough to pour them two cups.

She reclines against the pillows, cradling her cup to her chest.

“I think we're not the only ones with headaches this morning, no one from Tariq’s family is up yet except the children.” he explains, leaning back against the pillows, sliding his free arm underneath her neck.

They drink their coffee in comfortable silence.

“What do you want to do today?” he asks, and she grins, putting down her empty cup and turning to him, kissing the side of his neck.

“Make out with you.”

He laughs, and the sound is joyful and uncontrived.

“Good, that was my plan too…”

* * *

They take horses to a nearby rocky outcrop.

Tariq’s family raises camels, but they also have four beautiful desert bred horses, lean and athletic creatures with dark coats and big glossy eyes.

Tariq kindly loans them the two black mares, one of them already well acquainted with Ben considering the way he goes to her with an excited spring in his step, patting her flanks and kissing her nose as she chuffs at him.

She’s not the most skilled equestrienne, but the mare is relaxed and obedient, following Ben’s leading mare without much prompting.

“We have two horses on my parent’s farm.” Ben explains as they ride side by side towards the nearby mountain range, “I grew up riding them.”

“I did a bit of riding when I was on assignment, but I’m pretty much winging it right now…” she replies and he chuckles, brings his horse closer to hers.

Leans out of the saddle to kiss her, playfully.

The change in his personality is blowing her mind.

The reserved, serious-faced man from Algiers has disappeared so completely she might as well have imagined him.

They rest the horses at the top of a hill, under the shade of a rocky outcrop. She snaps pictures while he unpacks a light lunch kindly prepared by Tariq’s wife, and they eat in the shade, drinking mint tea until late in the afternoon.

Ben takes off his prosthetic leg for the first time in front of her.

The scar along his shin is smooth and white, and he smiles when she touches it gingerly.

“It doesn’t hurt.” he reassures, guiding her hand on the stump, “I feel a phantom limb sometimes, it's weird. It's like an echo of old sensations.”

She looks at the carbon fibre prosthetic lying in the sand, caressing the skin underneath her fingers. It's just skin, she tells herself, but realizes how intimate the touch must be for Ben and her heart throbs.

“I would think that you’d take it off more often, there’s probably loads of sand getting in there…”

He takes her hand in his, squeezing it.

“I feel vulnerable without it. It's a feeling I’m trying to accept, but it's not easy. I feel comfortable with you.” he explains, bringing her hand to his mouth to kiss her knuckles.

There’s a lot of kissing after that, clothes pushed out of the way for hands and lips as she returns the favour from the night before, his hand resting on the back of her neck as her head dips down in his lap, taking him deep down her throat.

She hasn’t done this in a long time, but it comes easy to her, licking and sucking, relaxing her throat around his girth only to feel him tremble underneath her.

Sharp muscle in his lower belly clenching when he spills in her mouth, bitter and salty, moaning loud and shameless in his pleasure.

They make love again that night.

Faster, harder than the night before, Ben’s endurance built up from the day’s activities, his strong thighs bracing hers as she sinks to hands and knees in the sheets.

His hands bruise her hips when she thrusts back against him, hard, his breath burning the back of her neck.

His teeth sink in the flesh of her shoulder as he trembles with pleasure, hips relentless in their steady back and forth, reaching his hand down between her thighs to caress her where she needs it most, coaxing her body to follow his own in pleasure.

Her orgasm is strong enough to make her knees falter, sinking down in the sheets with all of his weight on her back, hot and sweat slick, mind hazed with euphoria.

The two of them panting hard and fast as his hips work out the last spurts of his orgasm.

He sleeps with the abandon of a child, body lax, draped over her back, breath slow and deep.

He hasn’t dreamed in days.

The jeep will be done tomorrow, they’ll be heading back to Tamanrasset and in five days, they’ll be back to Algiers.

Her flight to London is in ten days.

She feels her heart get unbearably heavy at the thought of leaving the desert, leaving Ben.

She doesn’t want this to end.

* * *

In Tuareg culture, goodbyes are as important as greetings.

They eat, drink tea, their hosts making them promise to visit again as soon as possible.

There’s a shadow, a sadness, in Ben’s eyes that hasn’t been there for weeks and she hates to see it come back.

They pack their belongings in the jeep and head out on the road, back to Tamanrasset and its flat topped houses, its souk.

Ben drives silently, a tightness to his shoulders that only loosens when she lays a hand on his thigh, caressing it through his khakis.

They stop to camp at nightfall, and she remembers all their nights stargazing, laid too close to each other on the mat by the fire, heads together.

This time they lay naked with each other under the stars and Ben takes her with a passion heavily tinged with desperation, pushing her thighs over his shoulders, driving down into her.

The pleasure is overwhelming, his passion is too.

She can taste it in his kiss, in every touch, in the way he cries out his pleasure against her throat.

He has a dream that night, wakes up shaking and crying hot tears that soak her shoulder when she holds him close.

He’d called her name in his sleep, voice thick with anguish.

“It's okay…” she whispers, kissing his wet cheeks, his closed eyelids, “I’m here.”

His breath slows down, enough for the tension in his body to loosen.

“But soon you won’t be.” his voice whispers against her neck.

Her heart breaks at how small and resigned his voice sounds.

They need each other, she knows it, deep in her heart.

They have what it takes to heal each other.

She wonders what she’ll do without him.

They make love every night between Tamanrasset and Algiers, and every night he dreams that he loses her.

Every night her heart breaks a little more.

“Thank you…” he murmurs in the dark, as they lay face to face in the tent for their last night in the desert.

Their skin still warm from their tryst.

“What for?” she replies, sleepy and he takes her hands in his, kisses her knuckles and fingers.

“For being you. For being here. For not running away scared when you saw I was damaged.” he murmurs, against the palm of her hand.

She pulls him closer, kisses his lips, slowly, revelling in the feel of them against hers, plush and soft.

“You were never damaged to me, Ben. You’re human. I’ve seen what war does to people, what it did to me.”

“You still stuck around.”

“Have you seen yourself in the mirror, Ben Solo?” she teases, and he laughs, kissing the tip of her nose.

“I was cute enough to save, is that what you’re saying?” he replies, mock-offended.

“I’m saying that you’re beautiful, and that from the moment I saw you I knew you were on my path for a reason. You’ve helped me, a lot. I’m thankful too.”

There’s a comfortable silence between them after that.

She wants to tell him she loves him, but she has no idea if he’s ready to hear it.

She regrets not having the guts to do it.

It burns her tongue all the way to Algiers.

* * *

His apartment in Algiers is the apartment of someone who is rarely home.

Sparsely furnished, neat, nothing out of place.

It's impersonal and she doesn’t like it. It feels like a hotel room.

They don’t speak much, ever since they’ve been back in the city they’ve been careful with their words, afraid to break the spell of the desert. Ben is back to his quiet self, but he speaks in touches.

His touches speak volumes.

He touches her as much as he can, lips and hands speaking much more than his voice could.

Some days they hardly leave the bed, the warmth of each other’s skin.

“What brought you here?” he asks, in the middle of the night after a long shower they’d shared until the water ran cold.

“What do you mean?” she replies, turning to face him in the bed.

The bedside lamp throws golden highlights on his nose, his cheekbones, and once again she is baffled by his beauty.

He pauses, thinking of his words.

“There’s something about the desert. It draws people in for so many reasons, but one of them…one of them is healing. I came here to heal, years ago, and I think you did too. I want to know what you ran away from.” he asks.

She takes a deep breath, trying to get her thoughts together.

He’s more observant than she gave him credit for, remembering that he’s a seasoned soldier. Realizing that his observation skills are probably better than hers and that he’s read through her as much as she did him.

“I saw a lot of things in Syria.” she starts, and he brings her closer, coaxing her thigh over his hip, “Things I wanted to forget.”

He nods. He knows how war is better than she does in many ways.

“There was a fellow journalist living in my compound in Damascus. Poe Dameron. He was older and wiser, and made me laugh a lot. He…”

“He gave you something you needed?”

“He charmed me. He made me forget all the horror I’d seen for a few weeks. It was hollow, I realized it later.” her words stumble out of her, like she’s afraid of letting them out and yet it feels so good to finally tell someone, “I…I got pregnant. I panicked a little at first, but then…”

He caresses her hair, encouragingly.

“You imagined a life with him?”

“I did. When I went to find him he was speaking to his wife and son on the phone. The wife and son he’d conveniently never told me about. After that I just…I had to do something about it so I went to Turkey after my assignment. Got the pregnancy terminated.”

He takes her in his arms, kisses her forehead and her eyelids.

“It was horrible. I hated myself for doing it but I knew how hard being a single mother in my line of work is. It can cost you your career and I wasn’t ready to take that decision.”

“Do you regret it?”

She pauses, thinks about her feelings.

“I regret having to take that decision in my life. But I know in my heart that it was the right decision. I did come to the desert to heal.”

He leans low to kiss her lips, slow and hard, lust rousing to life in the pit of her stomach.

“Has it worked?” he asks, fitting his body on top of hers.

“I don’t know. I’m replacing heartbreak with more heartbreak.” she murmurs, sighing when he pushes inside her.

His hips surge and hers pulse in response.

“There won’t be anymore heartbreak after tonight, I promise…” he murmurs back, cryptically, but she doesn’t question it, letting him take away all of her fears, all of the hurt with his body, his soothing voice.

When she wakes in the morning he’s on the phone in the next room, but she can’t decipher what he’s saying, still in her sleepy haze.

He comes back to the room with coffee and she has an echo of that morning in the tent, after their first night and it makes her want to cry.

He sits down on the bed, and his mouth curls up as he wipes her tears with his thumb.

“Don’t cry, my love.” he murmurs, and the endearment only makes more tears fall.

“I have to leave today, how can you tell me not to cry?” she asks, and he smiles wider, coaxes her in his lap to kiss her lips and her nose.

“Because I love you, Rey. I love you and I’m not letting you get away and I bought a ticket to London to come with you.”

The words hit her like a truck. It takes her a few seconds to process.

“You are? Are you crazy?” she asks, screeching almost and he laughs, pulling her closer to kiss her again.

“Crazy in love, yes. I’d be crazy to actually let you go.”

She bursts into tears.

“So, will you have me?” he asks, and his eyes are full of hope and love and it's magnificent.

It's a look she hasn’t seen on him yet, hope.

It suits him.

So she doesn’t say anything, kisses him hard instead.

From the way he kisses back, she knows her  _ yes _ was heard loud and clear.

* * *

She stirs awake, stretching her arms above her head, slowing emerging from what feels like a cocoon of blankets.

Their bed is a huge affair, white sheets and pillows, and the odd stuffed animal left there by their three year old son, Noah, who sleeps curled around the roundness of her belly.

There are huge windows in their old, renovated house letting in the New Mexico sunlight and she basks in the rays, wondering where Ben has run off to.

Family nap time is taken seriously in the Niima-Solo household.

Noah stirs against her, turns to his other side and is promptly lost to dreams again, his adorable, rounded face lax and relaxed in slumber.

Noah likes sleeping and his naps, and she feels very spoiled to have such a quiet, easy going toddler. He takes after his father, dark hair and pale skin, long limbed and agile, but his eyes are hers, gold shot through with emerald. She wonders what this next one is going to be like, rubbing the bump that started showing a few weeks ago.

Another boy in five months. The ultrasound image is on the fridge door, along with Noah’s crayon sketches. Every day she stares at the little black and white pixelated image and her heart soars with joy.

Ben shows up as she sits up in the sheets, careful not to wake their slumbering son as he sits beside her on the bed. His long hair is shower damp, his skin moist and soft underneath her lips when she kisses his shoulder.

“You went for a run?” she murmurs and he nods, coaxing her back to the softness of the bed.

“Five K. Did you sleep?” he replies, reaching down between them to caress her belly.

“Like a baby. Was I this tired for Noah?” she asks.

“Yeah, you’d fall asleep at the computer writing out your articles, remember?”

They had settled together in London for a little while, after leaving Algiers, and then had gone back to North Africa, living in Marrakech. She’d resumed her journalistic work, deciding to focus on environmental and animal related stories, keeping Ben out of war zones.

Noah was a surprise. A wonderful one.

The result of forgotten birth control and a night bright with firelight and a little too much to drink. Born two weeks early in the desert, delivered in the morning sun by a tuareg midwife, his arrival punctuated with song and celebration. She’d never seen Ben more proud, cradling his dark haired son in his arms while the women cooed and the men sang, his amber eyes full of love and stars. 

Three years after they’d settled in Morocco, they’d decided to relocate, their one year old baby in tow.

New Mexico and its familiar deserts was the ideal candidate. An old house on three floors, huge windows and wooden beams in the ceiling, walls filled with picture frames.

It had become their home for the past two years. And she loved every minute.

She published books now, wrote for magazines and fiction too. She could write from anywhere, and so did Ben, his memoirs from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars making it to the best-seller lists.

It was an odd life.

A child and another on the way, the both of them published writers.

She wouldn’t have imagined this for herself in a million years and yet she thrived. They both did.

Ben still had episodes. He would probably have them for his entire life, but he wasn’t alone, when he woke up in the middle of the night, panicked, checking out if his son was safe and sound in his bed.

She was there to take him by the hand and take him back to bed, back to the safety they had created for each other.

“I can’t believe we’re having another baby…You’re so beautiful.” he murmurs, letting her pillow her head on his inner arm, his hand relentlessly caressing her rounded stomach, “I mean, I still can’t believe that we had Noah. I wake up every morning and I wonder how we did it.”

“Are you happy about it?” she asks, and he smiles, leans for a kiss.

“Very. I never imagined that my life would be filled with so much joy. All because of you, and our boy, and this little bean on the way.”

“When you met me, did you think it would happen? I mean, did you know you wanted to be with me?”

“From the first second. I never expected us to be parents and have this life, but I’m infinitely happy we do.”

She sighs, burying her nose in his chest.

“I’m happy we do too.”

His fingers slide up from her belly to her breasts, still small, but fuller, tender, cupping one in his big hand, slowly thumbing the areola and she sighs against his throat, filled with languid, pulsing lust. This pregnancy has made her insatiable, and Ben is only too happy to indulge her.

“I want you…” she whispers against the lobe of his ear, and he smiles, helping her up from their large bed.

They sneak off to the guest bedroom downstairs, letting their son sleep peacefully in their room while he makes love to her. She’ll never get tired of this, his mouth right where she needs it on her cunt, his beautiful body fitting with hers perfectly in the mess of sheets when she pleads for him to fill her, put his cock in her. The way he moans her name in her ear when he comes in slow, languid pulses inside her. Strong chest against her back and his fingers between her thighs teasing a shattering orgasm out of her as he climaxes.

Their child is a deep sleeper, only waking when they’re working on dinner in the kitchen, wearing matching sated smiles and flushed cheeks.

At night they look at the stars, lying out on a woven Berbère mat in their backyard, Noah between them pointing at this and that excitedly. Ben guides his little hand towards Orion, asking if he sees the belt of stars and the toddler nods.

“These are the stars that were in the sky when daddy got together with mama…” he explains to Noah, simplifying the situation for his young ears, who nods very seriously in response.

Her cheeks flush, remembering that night in the Sahara when they’d drunk too much arak and made love in the goatskin tent for the first time, on that fated quest to heal each other’s wounds.

She reaches for Ben’s fingers over Noah’s head, and he squeezes them in response.

They’re still so in love. She feels like she’ll always love him.

“So without Orion, you might not even be there…”

Noah perks up at that, sitting up on the mat, cupping his hands around his little mouth.

“Thank you Orion!” he shouts into the night, and they both laugh at his antics.

There is a truth to his childlike logic, however, because every night she thanks her lucky stars to have put her soulmate on her path.

“Thank you, Orion.” she echoes, looking over at her lover who mouths the words too.

In the white moonlight Ben smiles, looking too beautiful for words.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope y'all enjoyed this even tho its a bit...much? Anyway I loved researching for this one, I hope I didn't make any glaring mistakes, let me know in comments. 
> 
> First chapter got very little engagement so I might only be posting oneshots from now on LOL Chaptered work is hard. Thanks for reading and kudo-ing to everyone who did! xoxo


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